Nicole Hazard, AXA’s head of HR strategy, analytics, and innovation, says that the Fortune 500 company is using big data and powerful analytical tools to drive employee retention. It’s a very exciting role, she says, and one of the most future-oriented of those in the HR profession. One of the main roles of her team is to direct workforce planning issues by identifying the types of individuals the company will need in the future and how those talents should be sourced. To do that, as well as keep existing talent retained, the company is using a data-driven approach. “We’re looking at tools that help measure our culture and gain real-time feedback from our people on questions like how they are experiencing the company, what their workplace aspirations are, and what their experience at AXA has been like given where they sit in terms of the business,” Hazard says. “We also have piloted a big data analytics platform that allows us to gain access to over a billion data points from all over the world—data points associated with compensation metrics, labor pool, supply and demand, job descriptions of other companies where the hubs of talents are, globally and locally. This has been a tremendous resource for us in terms of workforce planning. From there, we’ve gone on to look at tools in predictive hiring.”